Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
. . . The function of psychoanalytic theory for art history may be to expose in art a site of yet unformulated knowledge about sexuality, to clarify this site as a source for ideas that are awaiting significance by language, and to articulate them.
Judith Butler argues that "any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution" in the phallic model (2) . . . The archaic feminine foreignness on the dark side behind the demarcating border is a concealed origin-nature, repressed and sacrificed. On her ruins, as Rosi Huhn suggests (3), the mythological master-artist, genius-creator emerges. The problem is not just how to deconstruct this structure. Rather, another process of meaning donation/revelation/ production is needed to unveil, out of what looks like "unregulated permeability" and "pollution", a borderspace, not fit for demarcating borders but for rotating and transgressive borderlines. I called such a filter, that extracts the foreclosed beyond-the-phallus and gives it the "relief" (4) of signification: the matrix; and its tool: metramorphosis.
Copyright © 1999, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, all rights reserved
